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Dean Nelson, TheAge.com.au: The family and followers of one of India’s wealthiest Hindu spiritual leaders are fighting a legal battle over whether he is dead or simply in a deep state of meditation.

His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, the founder of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan religious order, with a property estate worth an estimated £100 million ($181 million), died in January, according to his wife and son.
However, his disciples at his ashram have refused to let the family take his body for cremation because they claim he is still alive.

According to his followers, based in the Punjab city of Jalandhar, he …

Lavanya Sankaran, The Guardian: There’s this thing I do, every now and then. I will step away from the comforts of my life: my spouse and child, my home and dog. I pack a small bag with two pairs of old linen trousers, three T-shirts, a thin cotton wrap and flip-flops. Then I make the trek to a Vipassana meditation centre and begin a monastic life for 10 days.

These centres are scattered around India and all over the world. I have been making this trip for more than 10 years, varying my location each time. Wherever you go the retreat has an identical structure…

Harold Mandel, Examiner.com: The Times of India has reported on Apr 21, 2013, Tibetan administration to take over Tibetan schools in India. It has been more than 50 years since India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru took the initiative to open schools for Tibetan refugees, and now the Tibetan administration in exile is set to take over the 71 institutions which are functioning across the country. This transfer process began this month and will take at least three years to complete.

The Tibetan schools were set up after the first Tibetan refugees came to India in 1959. The schools are presently being run by the Central Tibetan Schools…

Tsering Namgyal, Asia Central: Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa Lama, arrived in India in January 2000, literally moving from his 12th century headquarters in Tibet onto the front page of international papers. Now, imagine a setting where, as a 28-year old teacher, he holds a few thousand people from all over the world under a spell for a few weeks.

This is precisely what the Karmapa, the head of the Black Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet’s second-most-powerful religious figure, after the Dalai Lama himself, has been doing every winter in Bodhgaya, India.

Times of India: Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama inaugurated a three-day international conference on ‘Buddhism and Society’ at Atisha hall of Central University of Tibetan University (CUTS), Sarnath on Sunday. In his inaugural address, the Dalai Lama said Buddhism is not only a religion but an ancient science. Emphasis should be laid not on its propagation, but its practice, he added.

Notably, a number of Buddhist scholars and followers of the faith have arrived here to participate in the three-day international conference which will culminate on January 15. Discussions on several topics, including Buddhist and scientific approaches, ecological significance and contemporary relevance of …

Nemmani Sreedhar, The Hindu: Faith, they say, can move mountains. But with a firm belief in their system, the faithful have literally created a mountain near the capital.

Spread over 150 acres, Pyramid Spiritual Trust is developing a grand meditation centre at Kadtal village on Hyderabad-Srisailam highway, the star attraction of the centre being a 114-foot tall ‘Maheshwara Maha Pyramid’.

Made of steel and concrete, this structure is the biggest pyramid in the world built exclusively to facilitate meditation, V. Lakshmana Rao, a trust member claimed.

“With practice and observation we have found that pyramids have great healing powers. Human body gets rejuvenated while …

Giridhar Jha, Daily Mail, India: The toll of war, over a period of time, can get the better of even the most seasoned army men.

It’s a fact well-established by the series of random shootings by veterans, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, who find themselves unable to forget the horrors of the battlefield, long after they return to civilian life.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is no longer a fancy psychological term only found in bulky books and journals on the subject. It’s a reality countries involved in wars are grappling with on a day-to-day basis, and which has forced them …

Every year thousands of westerners flock to India to meditate, practice yoga, and seek spiritual transcendence. Some find what they’re looking for. Others give up and go home. A few become so consumed by their quest for godliness that it kills them. Scott Carney, Details: Jonathan Spollen, a 28-year-old Irishman with long brown hair and a delicate brogue, was at a crossroads in his life. He’d embarked on a career as an overseas journalist, working first as a reporter at the Daily Star Egypt in Cairo and then as a foreign editor at The National in Abu Dhabi. But now he was a … Read the original article $raquo;

Michel Martin: if you wanted to predict just who the Dalai Lama might select to lead one of the faith’s most important monasteries, you probably wouldn’t think about a boarding school educated, globe-trotting New York photographer whose grandmother was one of the most celebrated fashionistas of her time, but that’s just who the Dalai Lama did select, saying his, quote, “special duty is to bridge Tibetan tradition and the Western world,” unquote.

Nicholas Vreeland is the new abbot of the Rato Monastery in India and he joins us from there now. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.